Engagement and the Death of Google Analytics
Apr 2nd, 2008 by Rich Page
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Google Analytics. Its free. Its great for measuring basic web site performance. Recently however, some small free web analytics tools have appeared, looking to better their offerings. And in one area in particular… engagement. As many of us know, because of the rise in web 2.0 like videos and gagdets built in flash and AJAX, the industry can no longer rely on page views as a metric to indicate site popularity. In fact, in July 2007 Comscore and Nielsen both stopped using pageviews as the primary metric for comparing websites - yet still haven’t replaced it…
And the newer engagement metric (average time spend - ATS) that many industry specialists seem to be starting to use lately isn’t a very good replacement - just because a page has long ATS, doesn’t mean its a good thing. Many websites, even popular ones, are fraught with usability issues, that delay the length of time spent on these sites unnecessarily. Some sites don’t even have a site search still, which makes it even longer to find what you are looking for, extending ATS unfairly.
Plus, media websites will always have longer ATS, as they have a heavy concentration of photos/videos. Does this make these sites any more engaging or popular than a non-media website?
So step in these Web Analytics 2.0 free tools, which seem to be focusing on Google Analytics achilles heal - their lack of engagement metrics offerings. A company called Nuconomy has been getting rave reviews recently about their new tool, which enables users to create and see engagement metrics - specific to web 2.0 events like blogs, videos and community events, and correlate these to see how they influence visitors. Further still, it allows specific sites to come up with ‘formulas’ to measure total site engagement, comprising of weightable metrics like feed subscriptions, video plays, product ratings, posts and friend requests.
And another new web analytics 2.0 vendor just recently sprung up - Woopra. In particular their tool is specifically designed to be able to analyze more ‘engagement’ based websites like blogs. And industry giant Omniture is starting to understand elements of engagement - version 14 of Site Catalyst includes reporting for a key engagement metric - video plays and completions.
So watch out Google - hopefully their analytics product managers are noticing this ‘engagement’ tracking trend - and their recent ‘event’ tracking ‘hack’ doesn’t really cut the mustard either. They really need to get back to their roots, and remember how they got to where they are today - by building technologies and taking advantage of bleeding-edge markets (in their original case, search advertising), and applying them to the newer web analytics 2.0 world. Surely they could at least integrate RSS tracking from their recent purchase of Feedburner. Come on Google, get with the web analytics 2.0 times…
And as for a replacement for pageviews as the industry standard… its hard to use a blanket ‘engagement’ metric across all sites, but what about using an ‘engagement by vertical’ metric? This would combine different predetermined elements of engagement (like video plays, product reviews and article comments), depending on what industry the website belonged to - media versus ecommerce, for example. Seems like the most logical future standard metric to measure site popularity. Thoughts anyone? Anyone from Nielsen or Comscore reading? I can only hope 
Excellent post Rich!
I completely agree with your assessment of Google Analytics. However, it seems that one of the reason’s Google hasnt adopted those type of tools is because they want to see how entrenched the web 2.0 movement becomes in web design.
Have you looked at the “engagement” metrics Nuconomy or Woopra are reporting? They aren’t actually much better than time spent. Yes, both take advantage of AJAX technology in their displays, and somewhat in their data collection approach… but neither of those are the real solution to understanding what it means to be engaged with a media property, or an ad. They haven’t created a cohesive framework around understanding the multiple dimensions of being “engaged”.
I wish them both best of luck. But they aren’t doing anything that Google (or any of the other vendors) couldn’t dupe quickly. Perhaps the point, similar to the previous commenter alluded to, is that Google and the other guys recognize that the metrics these guys, esp. Nuconomy, are focusing on… still aren’t the right ones.
No, none of us know the real answer, but jumping on distractions prevents us from getting there. And perhaps those guys will be the first. Let’s all keep watching, because crowning a winner (or a loser, in this case) is premature, I think.
[...] to die a slow, gradual death, strangled by new Engagement Metrics packages like Nuconomy - ie: Engagement and the Death of Google Analytics addresses why Google Analytics be superseded by better engagement measurement [...]
Great summary about Google Analytics and new trends actual.
Analytis are important, but not only by Google. Thatswhy, i hope yahoo and more others will offer new analytic tools with money or for free.
Ralph